Inventory Control for Restaurants: Stock and Recipe Costing

Control stock, recipe costing, and your kitchen margins

In hospitality, profit isn't just in what you sell, but in what you control. Unrecorded wastage, an outdated recipe cost sheet, or a supplier with prices that rise without notice can eat into your margin without you noticing. Food&Service inventory control connects what you buy, what you cook, and what you sell into a single system, so you know at all times what you have in storage and how much each dish truly costs you.

It's not about keeping a parallel Excel or doing endless manual counts. Stock is automatically deducted with each POS sale, supplier invoices are recorded by photographing them, and every recipe is valued to the cent. This way, you go from managing your kitchen by intuition to doing it with real, updated data.

Real-time stock, warehouse by warehouse

The inventory reflects exactly which ingredients you have available in each warehouse and updates automatically with every sale recorded in the POS. If you serve a dish, its ingredients are deducted from stock without anyone having to touch anything. This eliminates blind counts and lets you know when it's time to restock before running out of items in the middle of a service.

Additionally, you have full traceability of every movement: stock-ins from purchases, stock-outs from sales, and adjustments for wastage or breakage. This history allows you to reconstruct what happened with any product and detect discrepancies between theoretical and actual consumption, which is usually where profitability leaks are hidden.

Automatic recipe costing: the exact cost of every dish

Recipe costing is the economic X-ray of your menu: how much it costs to produce each dish according to its ingredients and quantities. In Food&Service, you define the recipe for each product with its exact quantities, and the system automatically calculates its real cost based on the purchase prices you've already recorded. When a supplier's price goes up, the recipe cost is recalculated, and you instantly see how it affects your margin.

With this information, deciding the selling price stops being a hunch. You know which dishes have good margins, which ones are dragging them down, and where it's worth adjusting the recipe or renegotiating with the supplier. It's the foundation for designing a profitable menu, not just one that sells a lot.

Purchase recording with OCR and Artificial Intelligence

One of the most tedious tasks in any kitchen is typing in supplier invoices one by one. Food&Service solves this with OCR and Artificial Intelligence: you scan or photograph the invoice, and the system extracts products, quantities, and prices, registering the purchase automatically. What used to be hours of manual entry becomes a few seconds per document.

This record directly feeds the stock and recipe costing, so inventory entries and costs are always kept up to date without extra work. The more invoices pass through the system, the more refined your inventory valuation becomes and the more reliable your margins are.

Suppliers and margins under control

Supplier management allows you to organize who you buy each product from and keep track of purchases made. Having this information centralized makes it easier to compare conditions, anticipate orders, and maintain an organized relationship with each distributor, instead of relying on loose delivery notes and WhatsApp conversations.

Finally, profit margins are visualized product by product, crossing the recipe cost with the sales price. This reading of real profitability, along with stock traceability, gives you a complete picture: what you buy, what you consume, what you sell, and how much you earn with each dish on your menu.